Explaining the obvious to TUAW

TUAW has a post, “Remove iTunes DRM easily and quickly with iMovie HD“, which talks about exactly that: the old iMovie/iTunes DRM “loophole”.

But the inexplicably, it goes on to say:

This makes you question why DRM is there in the first place.

It … does? 3 words, TUAW: Cory. Motherfucking. Doctorow. You can positively hear him jumping up and down saying “ARE YOU SHITTING ME?”. He has from time to time posted the occasional remark on the topic, in the general direction of Cupertino …

Maybe my dad’s not hip to the fantastic world of DRM, but anyone hip enough to know they need to break the DRM has already questioned why it’s there in the first place. UH DUH?

Best Ad Copy for a videogame, ever.

Critics: Toned down ‘Manhunt 2′ still too violent

Child advocates are urging parents not to buy “Manhunt 2,” a video game whose characters kill and torture using implements ranging from glass and shovels to a fuse box and a toilet.

I like your ideas, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Made for the Nintendo Wii,

So instead of hitting triangle-star-r1 in a Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs/Mountain Dew twitch fest, you actually beat fuckers to death with a shovel. I love you.

“There has been a reduction in the visual detail in some of the ‘execution kills,’ but in others they retain their original visceral and casually sadistic nature.”

“In my opinion, it’s the most senselessly violent and offensive thing I’ve ever watched,” said James Steyer,

In the meantime, let’s have a national debate about acceptable levels of casual sadism.

Steyer, who has not seen the version of the game being released this week, was talking about an unrated version that has been circulating free on the Internet since August.

Dude, wait, what? Why don’t I already own this? Anon fails.

That version contains more violence and sexually explicit content than the one being released commercially, including a scene where a man’s testicles are mutilated with a pliers.

Did I already make a torture joke? Shit. What’s Google have to say?

Results 1 - 10 of about 41,500 for testicles pliers .

Sounds about right.

“It’s disgusting,” Steyer said. “It’s so violent, it struck me personally as pornographic violence.”

Best kind, AMIRITE?

Similarly, the pliers-and-genitalia scene isn’t in the official version, but players may use pliers to torture.

Of course they can. (Results 1 - 10 of about 120,000 for pliers torture.)

Basically, this is the greatest game ever. I’m running out after work and getting this.

Mozilla (Firefox) chrome and the White Line Of Annoyance

This is how Pinstripe (and several other themes) look on Mac OS X:

Pay close attention to the point where the window (as in “thing managed by Mac OS X”), specifically the title bar/window chrome, becomes the application (as in “thing managed by the application, specifically Firefox”).

Now this is how other themes look on Mac OS X:

Note the small line.

What the hell, man.

I’ve been fucking with userChrome.css and the theme for an hour, and I can’t make that line go away. From whence does it come? It’s not in the images, as near as I can tell.

Update: It seems the source of the line is browser.xml in the theme. I don’t really see much in the way of css differences, but a Mac-friendly theme has a far more complete browser.xml than “white-liners”.

Why can’t something be perfect?

Lately I’ve been in a mode wherein I dabble with various technologies. One of them I’ve been using more heavily is Komodo IDE, which I like a lot, but also, makes me fuckin’ mental.

It is not perfect, though, which makes me insane, because it seems like often the most trivial things inhibit perfection. To wit:

• it lacks the ability to use PHP as a shell for any reason, esp. my custom compiled-with-readline PHP, which is more than adequate for simple tests and so on. But I can’t tell it to open a shell.
• For that matter, I can’t open /bin/bash either, which is odd since 2/3 of the platforms it runs on have that very program.

Its documentation seems to have been written for an audience that is entirely familiar with the product, too; often I’m sitting, bewildered, wondering what the hell the docs are talking about and trying to figure out why nothing in my macro works.  Enough forum and web searches and I discover I’m barking up the wrong tree, led astray by unclear docs. Yay?

Don’t get me wrong, I like Komodo a LOT: if you’re going to go cross-platform IDE, which means “slow, non-native, weird” I’d rather have Mozilla than Java, and it’s written in and around languages that interest me (esp. JavaScript). But sometimes products miss features in such a was as to make me insane.

More signs I’m doomed as a developer

From http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000849.html

I believe every software developer should have basic competence in a common graphics editor.

(Emphasis his.) He’s right; I’m so doomed.

There’s a few reasons; for example, I have poor color vision. No, I’m not colorblind. The best example I can give is, “I have CGA vision in a VGA world”.  I don’t see differences in shades, particularly in poor light or without a strongly contrasting background.

(I do, however, have extremely good distance vision - I can see farther, and more accurately, and anyone I have ever met; and I am very good at detecting motion, which is sadly useless while drawing pictures.)

This explains (1) why I never wore anything colorful until I met my wife (also, black is slimming), and (2) why I’m so good with a rifle, but it hinders my artsy-fartsy skill.

For me, though, it all comes down to, programming is forgiving and graphic design is not. If I go to learn, say, Python, no one is going to laugh that my “hello world” looks dumb (all things being equal). By my stick figures never transcend to real art.